The old folks at the Sunday Magazine have found this amazing thing and it’s called the Internet! First up is a surprisingly engaging etiological tutorial on the word “avatar,” and what the term means in web culture; e.g., Magazine MILF is the online avatar of a fashion and magazine obsessive who bears a striking resemblance to a certain editor-in-chief of Vogue and who writes a blog called Magazine MILF.

Two pages later comes Virginia Heffernan’s shill for KanyeUniverseCity, a new website that Heffernan describes as “stunning” in its marketing vision, even though it all seems pretty obvious to me. There’s a store, a music-distribution service and tour info, as well as further confirmation that Kanye West is an excitable egomaniac. On the other hand, who knew the ubiquitous rap-dude is a compulsive shopper? Kanye maintains a blog featuring Kanye’s wide-ranging obsessions, whether random chicks with gargantuan tits, home furnishings (boombox pillows!), nerd-culture events, or art and architecture. I’d love to see a list of Kanye’s bookmarks. Or rather, the bookmarks of his uncredited market editors. It’s pretty hard to believe that West has suddenly transformed himself into a polymath on the order of Karl Lagerfeld. The Kaiser, after all, is not a College Dropout.

Just as Detroit is getting its just desserts for lazily relying on SUVs while failing to develop green alternatives, so the magazine industry is getting theirs for depending on automakers’ ad revenue while publishing Green Issues that, critics rightly point out, largely recast consumption as do-gooder-ism. As Tim Arango and Stuart Elliott report in Sunday Business, automakers spent $414 million less on advertising in the first quarter alone, compared with the same time last year, and the pullback is hurting everybody’s profits. What should magazines do? Take up the good fight and encourage automakers to produce responsible cars that make sense alongside increasingly ecologically-minded editorial. After all, SUVs are as passe as George W. Bush; Prius’s are as hot as Obama.

p.s. As a proud daughter of Detroit who hates to drive, I get worked up about the auto industry’s role in the city’s demise. Don’t get me started on Kwame.

The Original MILF is now on J-Date! We spent one afternoon last week putting together a totally awesome and alluring profile. How many others can claim a mother and a brother on J-Date?